Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
- 1 Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
- 2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
- 3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
- 5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
- 6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 7 The Chemical Revolution as History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Postpositivism and the History of Science
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: The Philosophical and Historiographical Terrain
- 1 Positivism, Whiggism and the Chemical Revolution
- 2 Postpositivism and the History of Science
- 3 Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 4 From Modernism to Postmodernism: Changing Philosophical Images of Science
- 5 The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the History of Science
- 6 Postmodernist and Sociological Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution
- 7 The Chemical Revolution as History
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Historians and philosophers of science first voiced their dissatisfaction with the positivist-Whig interpretation of the Chemical Revolution in the 1950s and 60s. In his seminal study Lavoisier – The Crucial Year, published in 1961, Henry Guerlac challenged the prevailing opinion that Antoine Lavoisier was ‘the father of modern chemistry’ because it overlooked ‘the most significant ingredient of the Chemical Revolution’, which concerned Lavoisier's scientific heritage and not his creative genius. Guerlac argued that:
in the person of Lavoisier two largely separate and distinct chemical traditions seem for the first time to have merged. At his hands, the pharmaceutical, mineral, and analytical chemistry of the Continent was fruitfully combined with the results of the British ‘pneumatic’ chemists who discovered and characterized the more familiar permanent gases.
Following Guerlac's lead, subsequent scholars developed ‘thematic analyses of the Chemical Revolution from the perspective of larger developments in eighteenth century science’. New interpretations of the Chemical Revolution appeared when the positivist-Whig interpretative framework gave way to interpretive schemata associated with the rise of postpositivism, which shifted the epistemological centre of gravity of science from individual experimentalists to theoretical traditions.
Postpositivism emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a critical philosophy designed to modify or replace positivism. The dialectic between innovation and tradition was a productive one, which yielded in two or three decades almost as many studies of the Chemical Revolution as appeared in the previous century.
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- Information
- The Historiography of the Chemical RevolutionPatterns of Interpretation in the History of Science, pp. 53 - 88Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014